


Fear & Loathing, Apocalypse Daddy and Alice.

by ApocalypseDaddy



Category: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Genre: Community: sweetsaddiction, Dessert & Sweets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:40:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23891734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApocalypseDaddy/pseuds/ApocalypseDaddy
Collections: _'s A+ Parenting





	Fear & Loathing, Apocalypse Daddy and Alice.

We were somewhere around the bathroom on the edges of sanity when the sugar began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “Alice, I think you need to calm the hell down, you’re going to wake the neighbours up. It’s three o’clock in the morning and these people are sick.” And suddenly the night was full of strange vibrations. She was screaming like some kind of fruit bat that had mistaken corn fructose for an orange. What was this animal?

It was still four hours till daylight. They would be tough hours. I knew we would be completely twisted, fractured and wild and crazy by seismic shifts in our delicate minds. We would have to ride it out though.

The State had given us €300 to buy food. We had spent most of it on dangerous sugar. The kitchen looked like the sweet aisle in Disneyland. We had three bags of Haribo, seventy five chocolate coins, five sheets of high powered sugar paper, a salt shaker half full of sherbet dip and a whole galaxy of chocolate bars, fizzy bombs, face twisting sour chews… and also four bottles of coke, three tubs of ice-cream, two bottles of Fanta and five cases of Monster energy drink.

Not that we needed all that for the night, but when you are nearly four and get locked into a serious sugar collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can go. The only thing that worried me was the energy drink. There is nothing more savage, more out of control than a four year old in the throws of an energy drink binge. And I knew Alice would get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.

“Daddy,” said Alice as she slid down the corridor and smashed into the bathroom door. “This is way better than school.” She got up and sprinted back through into the living room. “Let it go, let it go, let it go.” Frozen was the only music we had, we played it over and over again like demented seals on some frozen Arctic tundra.

But before we go on, let’s get to the bottom of this sorry spectacle. Twenty four hours earlier and we had been sitting in the living room at Apocalypse House. I was four G&T’s in, Apocalypse Mommy was sipping long island ice-teas on a Zoom call with her friends and Alice was painting rainbows on the wall. The phone rang. Then another phone. But they were video calls from China, friends from school, old colleagues from the distant past with stories of corruption, gratitude and craziness in the time of Corona. But one of the calls was a revelation. It was work. A story. But what kind of story?

“Who is it Daddy,” said Alice. “What’s the story? We should do it, it will be worth it. We can get some sweets.”

She was right. The Lockdown 500. The biggest human experiment in the history of the mad mad world we all live in. Four billion people, locked up in the homes for fifty days. Could it be done? Could you last? We were going to dive into the beating, feral heart of the lockdown dream and find the story, the real dream. Alice, hyper-active and crazy from sugar. But would it end up being a nightmare?

Getting hold of the sugar hadn’t been as easy as it should have been at three p.m. on a Friday afternoon. Fear and paranoia was crawling up the walls of the supermarket, but the streets were empty so we rolled down the roof of the VW Golf and drove like deranged bastards across town at breakneck speeds. Apocalypse Mommy called when I was contemplating running the lights down by the stadium. “Do you have the credit card?” She asked.

“I have three major credit cards and €200 credit down at the sweet lab.” I hung up and made some calls to my contacts at the supermarket. I wasn’t going to mingle with these swines. They were sick and I was healthy and I liked that balance of nature in my favour. I’d left my mask at home so told them to pile the sweets outside the door in three cardboard boxes. I’d slam into the car-park sideways, put the tail out and they were to fill the trunk with the merchandise.

“Daddy,” Alice said. “The car is front-wheel drive, how are you going to power-slide into the car-park?”

She was a smart cookie. But she was young, there was experience to be gained.

“Speed,” I said. “With speed you can do anything.”

When we got to the pick up everything was how it should be. The car bounced over the pavement separating the road from the car-park. Before the green lizard had come to a halt Alice was rummaging through the sweets, tossing them up in the air and grabbing them from the sky like some kind of angry machine. Red, blue, green, more greens and more reds. She was guzzling them down.

“Go easy with those,” I said. “You’ll do yourself some damage.”

“It’s OK Daddy,” Alice said as she jumped back into her car-seat. I slammed the car into reverse and we high-tailed it out of one pool of chaos, straight into another. We left the car-park sideways, heading east.

By the time we got back to the apartment the sugar was already ransacking our senses. Alice ate another three wine gums to continue the buzz, I was crashing. I needed sleep, or food, or sleep and food. A nice comfortable bed, a hazy lazy Sunday afternoon. Instead there were errands to run and I had merely confused the sugar crash with a lull. Wave after wave fell upon me. These American sugar substitutes come on slowly at first, they fool you with their slow come-up, make you think the worst of it is over before they unleash some unholy riot on your liver, your kidneys. Your blood pressure tries to communicate with God, your glycaemic index spits out confused warnings like some kind of broken seismograph. Only you’re on Mars and the whole planet is a volcano.

“Where is the energy drink,” Alice snarled. “Where is the Monster? Where is the Monster? I need aspartame, this glucose isn’t working.”  
Apocalypse Mommy said, “Just give it to her. She has a hunger for it now, look at her eyes, they’re bloodshot.”

But Alice was one step ahead. She cracked the can open. It was a litre. A thousand millimetres of who knows what. Soon she would have no feeling in her tongue, blurred vision, no balance. There would be a total disconnect between the body and the brain.

It was bath time and Alice was coming up on a litre of energy drink. I tried to coax her into a corner but she ran up the wall. Apocalypse Mommy tried to grab her but Alice lashed out and then darted behind the sofa. We had her trapped though, the pincer manoeuvre, one each side, an arm each. But she sprang out, over the top, we were side swiped. But she couldn’t get far. A neighbour knocked on the door.

“It’s alright,” I screamed. “It’s bath-time.”

He screamed back, “It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

Where was I? Was this the lockdown dream? What was the meaning of all of this? Was there a story or was I just roaming the empty living room and kitchen, half blind on a sugar frenzy?

Alice was in the bath, somewhere. Water was running over the edges of the porcelain. Bubbles as high as mountains hid a Chinese plastic factory output of toys. The water was pink, empty bottles of Paw Patrol shower gel and foam bath lay scattered around the floor like machine gun casings. Nursery rhymes blasted from the radio which teetered close to the bath.

Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, Mary had a little lamb.

It wasn’t Frozen. It was worse.

“Turn it up, Daddy. I can’t hear it.”

“It won’t go any louder. Wash your hair.”

“I’ll get shampoo in my eyes.” And she started thumping the water. She created a Tsunami and grimy, soapy water was flushed down the corridor and into the living room. Apocalypse Mommy was oblivious, she’d had seventeen Singapore Slings and was having a Zoom chat with some old friends from China.

If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands. If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.

The music was deafening. I had to use a mop to clean her hair then left her to it. She was on her own now, she would have to deal with the crash by herself. The sugar had taken her to the furthest reaches of her mind, now it would take her to the darkest corners.  
Every day is a Fear and Loathing parody in lockdown

Two hours later she came into the living room carrying her school bag. I thought she wanted to do some colouring, practice the alphabet. This was school, after all. She laid the bag on the table and took out a little bottle.

“What’s in that?” I said.

“Advantame.” She said. “You don’t need much. Just a tiny taste. It makes pure Red Bull taste like ginger beer. You’ll go completely crazy if you take too much.”

“Where did you get this from?”

“Never-mind Daddy,” she said. “It’s totally pure.”

I drank half the bottle.

Alice said, “You did too much Daddy, too much too much.”

And she went to watch the Disney channel with Apocalypse Mommy. I crawled into bed to ride out the storm. The first waves were the worst, there was nothing like it, somewhere between honey and citric acid, sweet and sour colliding like blackholes at the centre of a galaxy so far away it isn’t there anymore. All I could hear was Richard Nixon and the Watergate tapes, over and over on some kind of evil loop. Only he was singing nursery rhymes.

The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.  
And a darkness swept over me. I could feel my kidneys, a trillion blood vessels breaking down the Advantame, working magic in the depths of my stomach.

Sweet dreams.


End file.
